A new GAO report shows that the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts isn’t the only place where developmentally disabled and emotionally troubled kids have been physically punished and restrained. The [new GAO] report, which came out today, details cases at public and private schools across the nation where children as young as five have been sat on, lashed to chairs, isolated for hours, starved, and humiliated as punishment for actions like “slouching and hand waving.” In dozens of cases, these punitive measures resulted in students’ deaths…

To be fair, most of the corporate media float these sensationalist red herrings almost to the exclusion of all else. Nevertheless…

Tonight on CBS News, Couric plugged an upcoming segment promising to examine the presidential candidates’ positions on what she called “one of the most serious threats to this country, Islamic extremism.”

A message from the Psychologists For Social Responsibility discussion group brings good news, and bad. A majority of the APA membership have made a significant step toward redeeming the organization, at least on the issue of participating in — and thus, tacitly condoning — inhumane treatment of detainees.

Many such organizations of legal and helping professionals — including the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association — wasted little time in condemning the Bush Regime’s unlawful and inhumane treatment of detainees, and in barring their membership from any participation in such abuses. The APA leadership, however, were apparently unwilling to give up what promised to be a highly lucrative association with entrenched political interests. Shocker.

Or is it just another case of the same old pedestrian status quo negligence, born of socially constructed ignorance, that always governs the behavior of the privileged toward atypical and non-privileged members of society?

Does it matter which? Intent may signify malice, but if the cause is mere ignorance and carelessness, what’s the difference? The effect is the same.

For those in search of Autism Awareness, I suggest you start by turning OFF your television.

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As a child, my experience of Easter was mixed. My early memories include the fun, the frivolous, and the unfortunate, the curious and the catastrophic, the “renewal” of spring and the crushing blows of “pragmatic” but uncomprehending nature, human and otherwise.

My lifelong agnosticism is not born of illiteracy regarding religious matters, as I was practically raised in the Presbyterian Church. I was as aware as any child of the significance of Easter in the Christian tradition. But like any child, my own perceptions were confined to the flow of my own experiences, whether pleasant or painful. My awareness of the commercialization, and the inevitable dilution of meaning that comes with it, came much later. And later still, other associations crept in…